FailForward @FailForward@qoto.org

# Playing piano with body weight and martial arts

Yesterday my piano teacher showed me how to play piano with body weight. The idea is that to achieve a full and colourful tone, one should not play just with arms and fingers, but rather with the full body weight as if leaning with the upper body on one's fingertips resting relaxed on the piano keyboard. I do not fully internalised the concept, nor can I perform the technique (that's exactly the point of learning, right?), but I do understand what it means.

## Weight transfer in piano play & exercises

Later in the evening I looked some articles and YouTube videos explaining the concept. There's plenty of materials explaining what it's all about: <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=piano+play+with+body+weight>

The take-away is that this is called weight transfer and there are many exercises to train it. The idea is to create a suspense bridge (feeling) between the upper torso and fingertip, use free-fall drop to play keys and effectively learn to transfer weight between fingers, instead of using force of finger muscles or arms.

This will of course take (probably long) time to develop.

But the concept is not unfamiliar, actually it very much resembles the use of body core to enact movement in Japanese martial arts.

## Using your body efficiently in Japanese martial arts & sports

I am only familiar with some (beginner level) swordsmanship-related techniques from Iaido, Kendo, Aikido and Bojutsu. I also know that what I am going to say applies to Karate too. One of the things they teach, is that to deliver a really powerful, controlled and effective strike (be it with hand, or sword), you should use your _hara_, that is, the power of the hips, the body core. Simple interpretation without all the esoteric garbage is that it is the hips which generate body powerful rotations and thus generally provide momentum in body movements (hara-centric methods). My subjective understanding of this is that the rest is the question of transferring that momentum into useful energy delivered by another body part, typically limbs (strikes using arms, kicks using legs, or throws using the upper torso).

Similar techniques can be found at the core of many sports/moving body experiences. Another thing I am familiar with is running: again the proper technique is all about body core and hips as the engine providing the momentum, legs are to deliver it to the ground. The rest is structural, or dynamic support. Or take gymnastics and especially aerobatic gymnastics. Use of body core and hips everywhere. And so on...

## Putting it together

So if I know (to an extent) the experience of using body core for martial arts, how can I transfer that same feeling into piano play?

And in turns out, I am of course not the first one to figure out the connection between weight-based piano play/weight transfer and martial arts. There is this marvelous site <pianodao.com>, where the author makes the same point in <https://pianodao.com/2015/10/31/piano-technique-weight-in-motion-boxing-taichichuan-and-the-cherry-tomato/>. Specifically:

> maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
> -- Kanō Jigorōi about judo/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan%C5%8D_Jigor%C5%8D

- the slow/fast judo throw video shows very well (if you are attentive) the use of hips during the throw.

> The role of the muscles is to help the body maintain an efficient structure – so we can use and apply body-weight-in-motion.

This will need more elaboration till I get this right...

Ha! And a lovely first comment at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644423

<https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1376985854229504007>

Open and very useful twitter thread on how a guy built a product (a to-do app) and then lost competition with a well funded VC-backed competitor (who told them in advance).

The crux of the story is perhaps: "to start something is one thing, the difficult part is to know/determine when to stop".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUGsLoZYXb4

Pure joy to watch!


#music #dance #rockandroll

Over the last weeks, I came back to the idea of fox vs. hedgehog by Isaiah Berlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox): _"a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing"_. In the past I thought my thinking is more of the hedgehog type (rather axiomatic, tree like structure with a deep root). The thing with such assessments is the problem of meta-self-cognition: what you are vs. what you think you are vs. what you like yourself to be.

Over the past year I started to write notes, at times even an intermittent diary for a couple of days, sometimes weeks. I discovered that my mind perhaps is not behaving like a hedgehog type after all. In retrospect, my notes are scattered pieced of memories, loose tidbits, quips, quotes, metaphors I come up with, or I read. The thing is, however, that I seem to be quite good in connecting those independent dots. Disconnected thoughts and scraps of stuff collected at around the same time tend to take a shape of a connected network of thoughts which then mold and over time grow into a interconnected network of bigger thoughts. All that, however, happens mostly intuitively, not as a directed effort - although at times that too, when I focus on studying some topic of actual interest of mine.

So what is it? It seems like what a fox would do: many loosely connected things which over time seem to take a shape of a deeper rooted tree. It seems after all, my mind seems to meander and bounce between the two sides as it sees actually fit. A fox which desires to become a hedgehog one day?

> It helps to have a story, but it is not always possible to control what that story is.
> -- NIck Harkaway, Gnomon

Attachment avoidance/emotion dismissing attitude is like driving 150km/h on an Autobahn with closed eyes. What the heck you think will happen?

On dogs and hierarchy.

> -- Nick Harkaway, Gnomon.

The character Konstantin Kyriakos in that book is like a walking library of quips. The writer apparently had a collection of witty pieces and he then wrote a character around them 🙂 .

> You should not be distracted by anything, you infant. When you work, you work. Does f*cking SEAL Team Six get distracted by Twitter? No. Why not? Because they focus. They have discipline. They know that what they do has consequences. People will die. Well, here's the news: the same is true of us. Money is life. Poverty kills. If you are going to get distracted by our computer, you don't deserve our job.
> -- Konstantin Kyriakos (banker) in Nick Harkaway's Gnomon

# How fear modulates our perception of others

> When we get into relationships with people, be they platonic or romantic, we tend to look for the similarities we share; so we find that person attractive, but we also find appealing “the complementing differences we have”.

But when fear enters the stage:

> "Fear ... distorts our perception of that other person, and _we start to look at people as a problem rather than a person._” You also stop seeing those similarities you once saw, the things that brought you together; all you can see are the differences, which have become a threat.
> -- John-Paul Davies, via [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/26/my-friend-is-an-anti-vaxxer-and-shes-converting-my-husband-what-can-i-do)

# Limits of folk psychology

Folk psychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology) helps us in everyday life a lot. It's a useful heuristic. It allows us to reason about ourselves, about other people and our relationships to them. It successfully takes us through maybe 90% of life circumstances. But then it tends to shows its ugly face. It sometimes leads us to dark swamps and we get stuck. Some earlier, some later, lucky (or naive?) ones who avoid the murky waters completely. It seems to be a function of how screwed up we emerge from our childhoods (thanks parents!) and the amount of life experience we collect over time. And it is the discipline of real expert psychology which then leads the way out of the swamps of misery back to sunny beaches and green islands. And some manage, though some remain in the swamp for too long causing them a lot suffering and again some remain there unhappy for the rest of their days. Perhaps one of the long-term goals of navigating life is to attempt not to end up in that last group.

# How to price your SaaS product

(summary of a blog post)

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/saas-pricing-strategy

This is a very useful 101 on SaaS pricing. Provides many good insights, worth
further study and referencing.

## In the beginning, the actual number you're charging isn't that important

Care for the magnitude. 5-10-100-1000-10k?

## Step 1: Determine your Value Metric

What are we charging for. Also, be wary of the revenue "under the curve".
Flat boxes "Good-Better-Best" are often not advantageous enough. Focus on
metric which scales with your customers.

## Step 2: Determine your customer profiles and segments

Be extremely aware who is the buyer and how they tick. The guy provides a
useful template for analysing the persona. It goes beyond what I saw on other
canvases, so it might be a useful analytical tool.

## Step 3: User research + experimentation

> 1. Priority 1: Foundational [See above]
> * Core customer segments
> * Value metrics
> 2. Priority 2: Core
> * Order of magnitude price point (are you a $10 product vs. a $500 product)
> * Positioning and value props
> * Packaging
> 3. Priority 3: Optimizations
> * Add-on strategy
> * Specific price point (are you a $10 product vs. a $11 product)
> * Price localization/internationalization
> * Discounting strategy
> * Contract Term optimization
> 4. Priority 4: Growth accelerators
> * Freemium
> * Market expansion (going up or down market)
> * Vertical expansion
> * Multi-Product

## Some other data

1. You should localize your pricing to the currency and willingness to pay of the prospect's region
2. Freemium is an acquisition model, not a part of pricing
3. Value propositions matter oh so much
4. Don't discount over 20%
5. For upgrades to annual discounts don't use percentages and try offers
6. Should you end your price in 9s or 0s? Depends on your price point
7. You should experiment with your pricing in some manner every quarter
8. Case studies boost willingness to pay quite a bit
9. Design helps boost willingness to pay by 20%
10. Integrations boost retention and willingness to pay

> Never underestimate the power of focusing on the customer through research. You should never, ever just do what they ask, but you need to be an anthropologist who knows them better than anyone else.
> -- Patrick Campbell, https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/saas-pricing-strategy

# Dolly Parton - The Grass Is Blue

> How much can a heart and a troubled mind take
> Where is that fine line before it all breaks
> Can one end their sorrow
> Just cross over it
> And into that realm of insensitive bliss
> -- Dolly Parton - The Grass Is Blue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFH-F6LUXIY


# Father and Daughter - by M. Dudok de Wit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4KXZVApsQ


Oscar Winner ~ Short film about love and passage of time

Beautiful animated movie about a father which leaves to the sea to never be seen again by his daughter who loves him, longs for him and searches/waits for him to come back. She won't forget for her whole life till the end of her days.

Actually watching the musician to play this instrument is amazing in itself. Maybe I should have titled the post "Church bells jam session", or something like that.

# Golden Earring - Radar Love played on church bells

> When I get lonely
> And I'm sure I've had enough
> She sends her comfort
> Comin' in from above
> Don't need no letter at all
>
> We've got a thing that's called Radar Love
> Golden Earring/Radar Love 1973

On March 11th 2021, churches around the Netherlands played a cover version of a Radar Love, famous '73 rock song by Golden Earring, by now an ancient Dutch rock band from The Hague. The event was in a tribute to Golden Earring and occasion of the front-man's 73rd birthday.

This is a highly interesting thing from several angles. Firstly, the bells cover version is interesting music in itself. Second, this is the first time I saw how the instrumentation of church bells looks like - I always thought it's programmed with a computer/microcontroller. Actually it's played similarly to a keyboard instrument, even though it has a kind of "sticks" and pedals instead of keys. I learned something new today.

Before checking the bells cover version, it might be interesting to get into the ear the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRlSHG5hRY4


And then the bells cover - actually there were several played on that day, but they seem to be the same score.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxweaPAQxAA


* The Hague: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uks5sSqXgPU
* Wateringen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6SFa_k3P4
* Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxweaPAQxAA

More news: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/03/church-bells-all-over-the-netherlands-play-radar-love-in-tribute/

Chris Grey in his latest blog post on the attitude of Brexiteers now after Brexit is done:

> The country, as represented by Frost, seems increasingly like a stroppy, entitled teenager who has stormed out of the family home in a tantrum and now endlessly complains that his awful parents are disrespecting him. _‘Not only are they no longer housing me,’ he whines, ‘but they are insisting I clear my stuff out just because I promised to when I left. And I’m stuck with paying the rent on my new place because they won’t help me out any more. Don’t they realise I’m an adult now?’_

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/fisking-frost.html